Ecopoetry, Ecopoetics & the Life of a Water Poet

April 12, 2011

On the Road Again

I head out day after tomorrow to talk ecopoetics with my friend Jeremy Schraffenberger and his grad students ( doesn't Engelhardt & Schraffenberger sound like a German confectioner?). The weather will be classicly spring-like: chance of rain, mid-50s. As long as the rain is sporadic, it's not bad for driving. Lots of chances for roadside animal spotting. I expect to see at least one eagle.

My new poetry project is aggressively ecopoetic, so the visit should offer a great opportunity to bounce ideas around. I'm continuing to struggle with the continuum between avant-gardistes, post-avantistes, and the quiet smugness of mainstream poets--whatever the hell we mean when we put "main-stream" and "poets" together. I'm deeply interested in the making of the poem--hence the -poetics--but I find myself bristling when I'm told what I should be doing to be interesting. I especially don't like being dismissed as, essentially, 'uncool.' I mention that because I generally feel, when I visit other blogs and commentators, that my interests are not valued. I don't think I can go further than to simply articulate my impression. All the rest is strawmen and bitterness.

So I think the more useful direction to go is to reverse Hawk & Handsaw's subtitle. I've been thinking a lot about what sustains creativity. The bedrock answer is, as it is for all sustainability projects, energy. Energy, for my writing, comes from the land I'm in, the animals and other life I share the land with, and culture. All of these things add language, the material I work with, they direct my attention beyond the bony shell of my own, limited skull, and they excite the chemical-electrical wilderness of my brain. Plus, a bit of focus.

I enjoy--and appreciate--the shiny frontiers of the avants. At its best, the energy there is expansive, deep, and inclusive. There's certainly less self-righteousness about carbon neutrality. Every so often, I wish I would spend more time in (formerly) smoky bars and coffee shops, talking late into the night about the best, newest thing. But then I head out across the land and find out that I regret nothing.

Comments

"Energy, for my writing, comes from the land I'm in, the animals and other life I share the land with, and culture. All of these things add language, the material I work with, they direct my attention beyond the bony shell of my own, limited skull, and they excite the chemical-electrical wilderness of my brain. Plus, a bit of focus."

Terrific philosophy. Hard to escape the land beneath our concrete floors, but we know its there, and when we go outside, press our shoeless feet against it, feel it sink, or resist steel-hard against the mutable flesh of our feet, we might wonder if there is language enough inside of us to bring this place into another mind's eye, but language is all we have, and the truth is, it's beautiful when we sustain the energy to admire its shortcomings, tinkering with the last word we chose until it glows like a thousand lightning bugs after a warm rain.